Dana Perino Blasts State Department: Explanation of Editing ‘Well Short of Acceptable’

Former Bush White House Press Secretary Dana Perino got heated on Fox’s The Five Wednesday over the State Department acknowledging they deleted footage from a 2013 press briefing.

The State Department admitted on Wednesday that several minutes from a 2013 press briefing regarding administration deception over the Iran nuclear deal was purposefully deleted. The deleted footage involved an exchange between Fox News reporter James Rosen and then-spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

Perino provided two reasons as to why the State Department’s explanation for the mishandling of the situation falls short.

"I think that their explanation falls well short of acceptable, because, one, it is a violation of the Federal Records Act. It has to be," Perino said. "That’s yet another Federal Records Act violation the State Department is dealing with right now.

"Number two, it had to be a political appointee who made this call because whoever the person is, the civilian, the bureaucrat that said aye aye, do this order, would never do that unless it came from somebody very powerful."

Perino and Rosen continued to talk about the State Department following up with their investigation.

"So I do hope that they follow up because this would be absolutely an unacceptable explanation if it were a Republican administration," Perino said. "They need to be held to account for it."

Rosen said many of his colleagues have called and emailed him with an idea of who the individual that carried out the order might be.

"Without going into those names because it would not be confirmed, one factor that has led people to focus on different people is the fact that this person who issued the order would still be employed by the Department of State," Rosen said.

"Yes, or elsewhere in the government. They could figure this out in about five minutes. When they say they are not going to look into it, ‘We’re going to look forward,' that’s unacceptable," Perino said.

Madeleine WeastEmail Madeleine | Full Bio | RSSMadeleine Weast is Assistant Social Media Editor for the Washington Free Beacon. She graduated from the University of Kansas in 2014. Prior to joining the Beacon, she was a Communications Fellow at The Charles Koch Institute. Madeleine is from Prairie Village, Kansas and lives in Washington, D.C. Her Twitter handle is @MadeleineWeast.